Maven: Would have liked to have played with you some. I really liked pretty much everything you posted D1. Early deaths are always lame

EGW: Too bad we weren't able to sync up a bit better. I like your approach to the game and enjoyed playing with you.

BoomFrog: I guess this is repayment for Dark Tower

Also, I agree with this:

BoomFrog wrote:I am a master of the arts of Mafia. If I appear scummy then it was intentional, if I appear to be town it's meaningless.

Well played.

Sabrar: I tip my metaphorical hat to you.

Peaceful Whale: This was a hard game and you did well. If I can suggest something to think about would be to relax a bit more. If someone calls you scummy D1, you probably aren't going to get lynched and don't need to start claiming your role or proving yourself Town. If you feel the need to defend/explain yourself, do it, but it's perfectly okay just to ignore it and focus on finding scum yourself.

bessie: Townie meta is preserved You had some awful luck this game. Wish we had more opportunity to chat ingame, but we were always working in different directions I think.

LaserGuy: I don't know what you were doing this game. You got every single read wrong. You had been meta reading Sabrar as scummy since D3, why didn't you do anything about it? And using your power immediately? Crazy town.

plytho: You played a very strong game and were definitely a lot closer to the truth a lot more consistently than I was. I stand by my contention that you underplayed your role--especially given that you getting killed would skip a night phase: you could have been positively suicidal. I kind of wish you had fakeclaimed an indy win (due to having a vote from every player) after Sabrar hammered

Madge: Sorry this was a rough game for you.

mpolo: Sorry I got you lynched. I blame BoomFrog. And LaserGuy.

Zyth: Even if we didn't see eye-to-eye on pretty much anything, I really enjoyed playing with you.

LaserGuy wrote:bessie: Townie meta is preserved You had some awful luck this game.

Her awful luck was mostly tied into me and h_a's awful luck. In case you haven't already seen the spoiler, N0, BoomFrog has some sort of Deadpool talk to the mod kind of investigation that got around my wraith power (immunity to night actions), which allowed him and Sabrar eliminate their non-town threat. Then there's whatever happened to heury; now that I am past being annoyed at him for dropping out of the game, I am a bit concerned about him.

The story of my life in xkcdmafia:

Tigerlion wrote:Well, I imagine as the game progresses, various people will be getting moody.

LaserGuy wrote:Crossover (@BoomFrog after game): BoomFrog, when you talk about players having odds of being scum, is this just sort of a heuristic that you use? Or do you actually have a spreadsheet of townie/scummy points that you assign and calculate probabilities from?

Or is this just part of the mystery of BoomFrog?

I try to assign probabilities to anything I guess in any part of my life. Declaring them and then looking back at the results helps you train yourself to not be over (or under) confident. It's a thing I learned from Harry Potter and the Method's of Rationality, which I highly recommend to everyone here.

Evil George Washington wrote:BoomFrog

Good play. Was hoping you were town though. How did you feel when I switched your wagon? .

BoomFrog wrote: No. I'm 99%+ convinced that you are not scum. If you are a GodFather who lucked out in getting copped by the only one shot cop then congratulations on you stunning luck and enjoy your unearned victory.

However, if you were not so confirmed I'd be pushing your lynch toDay. Everyone left has acted townie in their own weird ways, so it's time to look at whose actions have lead us in a good direction and whose haven't.

No, I’m not going to win, and winning is not that important to me anyway, but the implication that any victory I may have would have been unearned is a scummy thing to say, and not just if you’re scum.

I think I phrased this poorly, I really didn't mean to belittle your efforts. What I meant was that the astronomical contribution of luck would have overshadowed your efforts to play well. I didn't mean to imply that you weren't putting significant work into the game. I don't think this line would have pissed you off if you were town, and I was 100% sure you were town when I made the comment. Sorry.

LaserGuy wrote:BoomFrog: I guess this is repayment for Dark Tower

Also, I agree with this:

BoomFrog wrote:I am a master of the arts of Mafia. If I appear scummy then it was intentional, if I appear to be town it's meaningless.

Well played.

I expected that quote to come back and bite me harder then it did. You can't say you weren't warned.

"Everything I need to know about parenting I learned from cooking. Don't be afraid to experiment, and eat your mistakes." - Cronos

400 shoutout's is going to be a lot.. I don't think I'll ever try a game this size again.

Maven: I knew you were going to be a threat to us if I let you live. I regret nothing.

EGW: Don't feel bad that I tricked you. I'm very tricky. You focused too much on inactive=scummy. I think you could have been well served by sitting back and watching what happened without your influence, and trying to observe who was influencing. Your heavy influence on towns direction overshadowed our scummy subtle nudges. I should have been lynched for JimBob. Not because I wasn't on at deadline, but because I didn't care that no one was fighting JimBob's lynch.

Sabrar: I am amazingly impressed with your mental fortitude. You played a consistent and solid game. I do think I would have caught you as scum though, I was sincere that you didn't reevaluate your reads often enough.

Peaceful Whale: Still impressed you picked up on that subtle scummy post where I let Sabrar off the hook too easily.

bessie: The next time you're actually scum, it's going to be so hard to get you lynched...

LaserGuy: Don't feel bad about getting everything wrong. Start paying attention to your confidence levels and the results, I really think it will help you. You've got the instincts to be a chessmaster someday.

plytho: You had really solid reads, but no one took you seriously. You really do spend too much time on distractions, and are too cautious. When you've got a strong scum pick, make the lynch them or you. Keep people's focus on it. You naturally are a consensus builder, but that doesn't work in an environment with disingenuous actors. If I could combine Laser's confidence and your analytical ability you'd have a champion.

Madge: Thank you for toughing it out and playing the game to the end. You're a trooper.

mpolo: Good ol' mpolo. Besides the weirdness with your role I was going to have a really hard time getting you lynched. I'm surprised you didn't bring up gargoyles more, but I guess that was a long time ago. I can't believe you actually withheld N3 and didn't even switch yourself and someone scummy like FF.

Zyth: I wish we could have been town-bros, although then one of us would have been NKed early, I'm sure. See you around space cowboy.

Red Ryu: Solid play all game. Obviously you were playing to a meta that I don't know, but you pulled it off well.

Gamma Emerald: Rough game.

Spak: If I wasn't scum I think I'd have spared you D2. That self-hammer was real right?

Frozenflame: Hope you feel better buddy.

jimbobmacdoodle: You had good instincts and good reads, I'm not sure what went wrong for you. Maybe too passive?

moody7277: Bad luck man (or good luck considering how grueling the game was).

SirGabriel: I hope your RL stuff is okay. You are welcome back imo, everyone gets stressed about stuff.

Last but not least:Overswarm and YOLO: Thanks for running things especially when it got rough going it alone, it was a fun, well balanced yet very different game. All the powers were basically decoys and it was almost vanilla with lots of things to talk about. Which is actually the best kind of mafia. I think the Mafia B team was a bit too weak though, no kill is very disempowering. They either needed another member or a way to take control of the late game if they survived that long. Maybe give them an arsonist kill or something? I'm very curious how the two unused vote restricting powers would have worked out in practice. Maybe make their use mandatory next time

"Everything I need to know about parenting I learned from cooking. Don't be afraid to experiment, and eat your mistakes." - Cronos

BoomFrog wrote:EGW: Don't feel bad that I tricked you. I'm very tricky. You focused too much on inactive=scummy. I think you could have been well served by sitting back and watching what happened without your influence, and trying to observe who was influencing. Your heavy influence on towns direction overshadowed our scummy subtle nudges. I should have been lynched for JimBob. Not because I wasn't on at deadline, but because I didn't care that no one was fighting JimBob's lynch

Peaceful Whale: Still impressed you picked up on that subtle scummy post where I let Sabrar off the hook too easily.

Thanks. I may try to be less influential in the future. I realized being so influential earlier on only leads back to 'you lead all of the wrong paths, you must be scum' result for me. I should have re-evaluated.

On the Peaceful Whale thing, I think I noticed it from him too. That is why I quoted it for him to re-inforce that. (Or it may be a different one) Funnily enough he thought I was talking about his own content.

I kind of went on MPOLO because I was sure that I wouldn't be able to convince Laser to go to Sabrar or Ryu so if he was Sk then maybe we'd be able to go in that direction the next day, maybe. I was pulling out who I felt really was scum at the last day because I may have been lynched so I would rather point out who I felt was very weird.

I think you could have been well served by sitting back and watching what happened without your influence, and trying to observe who was influencing.

You asked for feedback EGW, this is my suggestion. You get caught up trying to do a million things and it can be distracting. Your mind gets starts overanalyzing a recent or live interaction instead of staying grounded in the history of the game; I've done this too. Take like a day to step aside and observe what's going on in-thread, read back a bit, and just focus on who's making the scummiest posts. You get caught up in making X or Y happen, sometimes it's good to just sit back, be quiet, relax, WATCH then come in and push lynches. Just watch sometimes, you will see things you don't when you get all frantic and overly involved in the flow of the game.

I thought you were pretty fun to watch though, I don't plan on playing soon but it'd be fun to play again.

Oh and since I forgot plytho in my last post, well done. You gotta good style.

@EGW: We had to get 4 misslynches to win the game, even with getting 3 out of 5 enemy scum to take a lynch as well. With no mod kills best case was 7 enemy scum are lynched and we still need 3-4 town lynches. 2 members in a 20 player game is too few. There was no way there were only 2 scum left, but you wanted that to be true because everyone seemed so townie.

"Everything I need to know about parenting I learned from cooking. Don't be afraid to experiment, and eat your mistakes." - Cronos

1. My name is George irl, so when Zyth and others called EGW George, I did like a double take lol. Zyth WOULD do something like call people by their real names, so I thought he may have been playing with me at times.

2. I called my roommates dog, Rosie, bessie by accident on at least more than one occasion because their names are similar and I had this game on the brain sometimes.

#HBC | YOLOSWAG wrote:1. My name is George irl, so when Zyth and others called EGW George, I did like a double take lol. Zyth WOULD do something like call people by their real names, so I thought he may have been playing with me at times.

yeah guys this game was really tough for me and i really didn't appreciate everyone piling on me and treating me the way everyone did. it made me feel like shit, like my parcitipation in these games makes them worse and why do i bother does anyone really like having me around perhaps i should just quit . and then people were pushing me when I made it clear that I had this assignment that was sucking every moment of my life.

and on top of that i didn't even get to activate my role which REALLY upset me as I had to be VT in a huge long game that was full of people abusing me.

i hate it and i hated this game nad i'm glad it's over.

i can't believe everyone managed to play properly with the speed of this game.

i am REALLY pissed I didn't get to post on the final day, I spent half an hour of time I should have spent on my assignment reading the thread and missed making my post by liek FIVE MINUTES. I am furious. (I submitted my assignment with like 15 minutes to spare so that extra half hour would have been nice). But that's my own fault for not realising that the assignment I was planning to do in 12 hours was going to take more like 36 (HOW).

MVP is BoomFrog for that N0 check on moody which I advised against. No way I don't out myself in 5 days if I don't get that early town-cred.Shout-outs later tonight or tomorrow, didn't expect post-game so soon.Did YOLO link our scum-chat? If not here it is (hope I'm doing it right):https://www.quicktopic.com/52/H/GrKcwT4ZmVUZ

No time to post properly now, but quick congrats to Sabrar et al, and thanks to the mod. If I remember correctly, my D3 POE list of 6 included all 4 of the remaining scum! I'm a little bit shocked by that. I did subsequently rule Sabrar out due to his D1 lynch swing, though. If town had just listened to me we'd have won

Regarding setup:I love that OS provided an oversight of how much thought went into creating it. While I don't agree with the strength and weaknesses of every role it takes true dedication to plan with such fine detail and I really appreciate all the effort he went to.

Regarding the actual game:We got lucky with a lot of things. We managed to avoid NK-ing all the dangerous roles, the Commuter (because BoomFrog copped him), the Voteblocker (who we knew existed due to BoomFrog copping moody), the Bomb (ditto), the Deflector (of whom we had no idea) and the Night-skipper (ditto). Indies self-destructed, we had a couple of mod-kills and somehow Madge made EGW turn onto FrozenFlame instead of BoomFrog (I still can't believe how lucky we were there).Towards the end I felt more and more confident because even though all of us was suspected, every Town-member had also at least one of us as 'confirmed' Town. I was very happy that we managed to avoid having connections to each other in our interactions.Due to my meta this was the first time ever that I had the chance to fake a town-slip and then nobody noticed it. So sad.

Regarding my lurking: Work became terribly busy otherwise I would have participated a lot more (anyone scum-reading me because of less content than usual should be aware that I post the same amount as any alignment so this is completely irl-dependent). With that said EGW and LaserGuy were totally right in their observations that I used my time less efficiently as if I were Town.

Shout-outs:

Amrock: you had a very rough time subbing in to that role. Please come back for a proper game!

bessie: when I read your flip there was a small voice at the back of my head that said there was something wrong with it. It was not until I read the reactions that I went back and actually checked and I was incredibly surprised that I missed both the orange color and the big 'Mafia' in it. I've already expressed my sympathies in the Gojoe thread but it was for the wrong reasons, so please accept them again. That was an extremely hard spot.

BoomFrog: thank you. It was incredibly fun playing against you in the thread and planning the downfall of Town with you outside of it. 10/10, would scum again.

Evil George Washington: I can accept if my actual play causes people to lynch me but I get defensive if I'm accused of being scum for the wrong reasons. Madge made an honest mistake which caused you to scum-read me together with her and that was extremely frustrating. Otherwise I very much enjoyed sparring with you, even if most of the time I was just sheeping.If you allow a small advice, don't second-guess yourself that much. Sometimes Occam's Razor works and the simplest explanations are the true ones. You should have stayed with BoomFrog D4, Ryu should have been lynched after not protecting bessie and even when I hammered mpolo within seconds of Ryu you still thought he was just being framed. You let us get away with too much.Regarding hydra this still stands.

FrozenFlame: sorry if I have accidentally antagonized you, I still think that sticking to claim-order is the right thing to do but I really shouldn't have tried to explain myself in more detail. I think I already gave you a shout-out in the Gojoe thread, would be great to play with you when you have no irl issues to diminish your enjoyment.

jimbob: have I mentioned that I always find you scummy?

LaserGuy: thanks for subbing in! You made a very accurate read of me in post 313 in the chat but then you didn't do anything about it. And now you know how I feel when I get my reads wrong.

Madge: sorry you didn't enjoy the game. I tried to defend you, even if for nefarious purposes only.

Maven: somebody has to be the D1 kill, right? Sorry about that, though if I understand correctly you would have died anyway even if in a blaze of glory.

moody: already commented in Gojoe, terrible luck indeed.

mpolo: I needed you alive in case BoomFrog is lynched because town!me would have been insta Nk-target without protection if I absorb RoleCop. As it turns out you were a good scapegoat as well though I believed it wouldn't happen after you proved yourself N4.

Peaceful Whale: you played a good game, getting NK-d is always an honor even if it stings.

plytho: yes, now we know that being stubborn is not alignment-indicative for you. But it was welcome anyway that you took bessie's attention away from other matters.

Red Ryu: great job partner, I thought you were a goner after we killed bessie.

Zen: extremely nice play with the Cop-claim! I knew there was something fishy going on because of the flavor but even though you said you are liable to lie as Town I still haven't guessed that it was false. I found it funny that you town-read me because I scum-read you for so long. If that's what it takes I will scum-read you for all eternity.

JudeMorrigan, where the heck have you been? Get back in here and sign up for a game.

#HBC | YOLOSWAG wrote:2. I called my roommates dog, Rosie, bessie by accident on at least more than one occasion because their names are similar and I had this game on the brain sometimes.

Aw, you were thinking about me me me! For fun, I’ve been calling my dog marshy all day (there’s a picture of us in the Gojoe thread here). But I need to knock it off because I think my husband likes that name; he never did like “Hoku” or maybe he just hates everything Hawaiian (that a joke I’m Hawaiian, and my husband loves being “forced” to go to Hawaii to visit his in-laws).

SirGabriel, Znirk - Sorry RL got in the way. Come back and play again soon.

heuristically_alone - Same as above, unless you intentionally lurked out to make my life miserable, in which case burn in hell.

Amrock - As I’ve said before, I like you Amrock. Thank you for doing the best you could in a doomed situation. I hope you give this site another try someday.

Spak – I would like to play with you again when you have more time.

Gamma Emerald – You were right I did mess up your claim, sorry I wasn’t around to set it right. Thanks for trying to help out Peaceful Whale when he wasn’t following closely enough and he voted judgment.

mpolo - The usual distracted but solid play. If he makes it to late game mpolo usually figures everything out, so unfortunate for town that he was hammered.

moody7277 - Never alters his meta. Do you even read your role PMs?

Maven89 - Obviously the best player in the game, as he was the first night killed, therefore the most feared. I want to say that you have my admiration for this post:

Maven89 wrote:It's midnight where I am and I just got home, I managed to skim through what's been posted, I'll post something. Of value tomorrow, but until then, unvote:power whale or whatever, the whale guy. I'll post more about his read list tomorrow, but if he keeps up with what he just did then I will oppose his lynch day 1. If anyone still wants to lynch him speak up now

You not only read Peaceful Whale correctly, you took a hard stand against his lynch when others (including me) were willing to string him up.

Peaceful Whale - Sorry about your RL issues on D2, thank you for continuing to play. You’ve done well in improving your game. You should take advantage of all the kind souls we have in this group and ask more questions (as you should have in our chat). If you are following a game, post in Gojoe more often, and someone will reply to you, as moody did.

jimbobmacdoodle - Sorry about the tunneling. But plytho was so overeager in defending you on D1 and in distracting me from analyzing you that it reinforced my scum read of you.

FrozenFlame - I really like playing with FrozenFlame (as I did in The Dark Tower), his posts crack me up. I regret that I couldn’t do anything to swing the lynch away from you on D4, but it all happened when I was at work, and by the time I got home it was too late. Sorry about your RL issues, please come back and play with us again someday.

#HBC | Red Ryu - Too bad you were so busy, you played an amazing game and I’m not sure if I would have caught you. I also want to acknowledge and express my respect and admiration for this.

#HBC | Red Ryu wrote: Hey guys, I'll be back to this tomorrow, I am doing a league of legends charity drive for hurricane victims, more specifically one run by smash players. I will get right back to this asap tomorrow after that.

LaserGuy - Tsk tsk, you were so close here. You suspected that I was correct on the setup. Why didn’t you follow it through and figure out that if I was recruited and by myself, that I would be highly motivated to catch scum from the other team and have them flip? That post should have led you to BoomFrog (and possibly to Sabrar after BoomFrog’s flip, though it would have also led to Madge).

Madge - Sorry you didn’t have a good game, and for picking on you. But hey two of my favorites, including the man with whom I am currently smitten, were preferring you to me me me, what did you think I was going to do? BoomFrog, are you listening? I’m not going to be ignored, BoomFrog.

plytho - plytho, I want to respond to this, but I think it may take a while, and may result in some additional discussion, but I’ll try to summarize my thoughts.

Spoiler:

plytho wrote:I want you to acknowledge that sharing public info is the townie thing to do or explain why not.It's not intentional, I'm sorry for making you spend all your time on this. At every point I was hoping for a quick resolution.No, in fact I'm looking forward to your reads list.Not much, I think. You're a bit behind on the thread here (I know why.)

Will you give me the answer here in Gojoe? The major part of my motivation to keep pushing this is the underlined bit but I'm also genuinely very curious about what you think I've been fishing for.

Note that I’m going from memory on a lot of this, not from a reread or my notes, I hope I remember it all correctly, errors are unintentional.

To begin with, I always thought there were two mafia factions. From my first game post:

bessie wrote: FrozenFlame, thanks for the quick overview of Overswarm’s games, as I’m not familiar with them. I love setup spec and my initial guess, were this an xkcd mod, would be 13-3-3-1 or 13-4-1-1-1. But in light of your post, I’m going to think about it a little and maybe come back to this later.

First of all, I don’t think that you fishing for more information about Peaceful Whale’s role and target(s) at the time you were doing so was in town’s best interests, but I think that I may not be able to convince you of this. I can say that I believed you to be scum, and were you scum, it made perfect sense to fish for this information for your own team, and that you continued to discuss this was viewed by me as also trying to coordinate with the other scum team (PW hinted on D1 he would be targeting me with something on N1, and I wanted to let it slide, not highlight it). It’s easy now that we know the setup to see just how beneficial it would be for scum to have this information. Mafia A would know who to target, as they would want to hit the cop, and Mafia B would know who to target, as they wanted to hit confirmed town (my speculation at the time was that PW and I would be two NK targets, and the two teams would be trying to work out not overlapping the kills). Your insistence on discussing this so early in the game may have helped push Peaceful Whale to claim more and earlier than he should have (he had a solid town read on you, see Mason chat). I’m not going to rehash everyting now, refer to this. Also plytho, sometimes town has information that they want to keep hidden for a while, and you need to trust the judgment of the person that has the information to release it at the right time. I strategically moved Sabrar off of something, and then had to explain to you that I did so in this post, drawing attention to it.

And plytho, you really pushed this for far too long, and replying to you took me hours at the expense of analyzing other content. And though you say you tried to drop it, you continued to call me out for not responding to everything you posted.

Sabrar wrote:plytho: yes, now we know that being stubborn is not alignment-indicative for you. But it was welcome anyway that you took bessie's attention away from other matters.

You not only drew my attention away from BoomFrog (and Sabrar), but since I kept saying that I wanted time to read jimbob, it looked to me like you were deliberately keeping me from that read, which strengthened my scum read on him.

After thinking about this all day, I’m wondering if you just wouldn’t let this drop because you were trying too hard to make this stubbornness part of your townie meta.

plytho wrote:The bit about me being happy that this would no longer be my scum meta is quite accurate though

Anyway, I’m not trying to be confrontational, so I’ll leave it up to you, if you want to discuss this further I’m available here or by pm. And I look forward to playing with you again soon, in spite of our misunderstandings you are moving up on my favorites list.

#HBC | Zyth -There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.

I don’t know what to say, except that my overall impression of you is that you are just one of those rare, all-around amazing people. All of your content was extraordinary, and instrumental in moving this game forward. That false cop claim was quite remarkable (and your death should have led straight to BoomFrog). And thank you for all the time spent answering questions, like setup, and DGames meta, and my question on the hydra. Should we ever play together again I will clear a space for you on my “favorite people to play with ever” list.

Evil George Washington - See my Gojoe post here.Zen may have been a light for all, yet, although you didn’t know it, you were my light as I struggled through the content overload, and you inspired me to keep up and to do my best.

Evil George Washington wrote: BessieI'm assuming you were town up to a certain point. It was good to have you as an ally until that point. I'm glad you were nk'd but it was unlucky for you haha.

I was always your ally, as I always had incentive to scumhunt. I’m kinda relived though that this didn’t come down to you and me as the final two. I would have felt bad about snatching victory away from you at the end.

Evil George Washington wrote:It was very fun playing with you all, you guys should play with us on Smash boards.

I am hoping that all of you had a good time and will stick around and play here again, especially now that the site registration is temporarily working. But if not, let me know when you plan to start playing on Smashboards again.

BoomFrog -

BoomFrog wrote:I could only be more happy if I ended up scumbuddies with Bessie.

Same here, except for maybe with Sabrar. I am so totally jealous of Red Ryu.

BoomFrog wrote:I think I phrased this poorly, I really didn't mean to belittle your efforts. What I meant was that the astronomical contribution of luck would have overshadowed your efforts to play well. I didn't mean to imply that you weren't putting significant work into the game. I don't think this line would have pissed you off if you were town, and I was 100% sure you were town when I made the comment. Sorry.

I think you underestimate my capacity for being pissed. It’s pretty much my natural state. But now that I know the flips I understand your preference for Madge over me.

BoomFrog, I’m trying really hard to be mad at you, but it’s difficult when you keep saying thing like this:

BoomFrog wrote:There is such a metric fuckton of content, I had other priorities for my limited RL time and attention.

BoomFrog wrote: The Cojones Museum has requested Zen donate her amazing collection in the event of her death or Zen is town.

BoomFrog wrote:It's a meta read of your personality. You are almost the polar opposite of YOLO in almost every way. I dare say that if the two of you meet in real life it might be dangerous to touch.

Still smitten.

Sabrar -

Sabrar wrote: MVP is BoomFrog for that N0 check on moody which I advised against.

Aw that’s cute. Sabrar is trying to be humble. But he’s not fooling anyone, for once more Sabrar is the smartest guy in the room. And yet again, Sabrar and I are not destined to be together in that room. Well done my old adversary, perhaps in our next life we shall be on the same team.

By the way, Sabrar I think you owe Madge an apology for your assertion throughout the game that if Madge was scum, BoomFrog must have been coaching her. Madge doesn’t need anybody to coach her. When she has time and she’s on her game, Madge can be brilliant all by herself.

bessie wrote:FrozenFlame - I really like playing with FrozenFlame (as I did in The Dark Tower), his posts crack me up.

Frozen's cuss-filled rants are HILARIOUS! They crack me up too, I've chuckled while reading them numerous times. I know him IRL, and he is always jovial when I talk to him. EGW comes across as a hardass in-game, but he is one of the goofiest people I have met. It's very amusing reading their posts and comparing tone to real life.

bessie wrote:LaserGuy - Tsk tsk, you were so close here. You suspected that I was correct on the setup. Why didn’t you follow it through and figure out that if I was recruited and by myself, that I would be highly motivated to catch scum from the other team and have them flip? That post should have led you to BoomFrog (and possibly to Sabrar after BoomFrog’s flip, though it would have also led to Madge).

In retrospect, I feel like this happened a lot to me this game. There were a bunch of times where I was so close to hitting the right mark and either forgot about a lead or got distracted or didn't want to push it because I felt sure it was a false trail or I was townreading the person for other reasons and just dismissed the evidence (e.g. BoomFrog's slip about scum having bad fakeclaims). Though I'm sure lots of other people probably feel the same, and it's a credit to scum how smoothly they were able to misdirect us away from the right answers.

First and most important, thank you Overswarm for the extraordinary game! I feel quite honored that xkcd was chosen to host this, and that so many players participated in this special cross site game.

Next, thanks to YOLOSWAG/marshy for modding. I appreciate your dedication in ensuring this game happened; it appears there were a couple of false starts with MafiaScum. I also appreciate the time you put in to running the game, I would have been happy to help you out but hey I lived too long.

And a special shout out to Rajam, I know you had to drop out early for RL issues, but thanks for your persistence in getting the DGamers registered and approved when the site registration wasn’t working.

Hey, Overmarshy, if you have time, can you post the role pms and win conditions? Or are they super secret information?

@OverswarmRe: General Game Notes. I really appreciate that you shared this with us. I am quite impressed with your attention to detail, and the thought that you put in to how the factions and the roles interacted with each other in designing the game. And as I am usually against early claiming (and mass claiming in general), I was pleased to see that you put some mechanics in place to make this a disadvantage to town.

I'm not sure what you mean though by “lynch all indies” not necessarily being a good thing, as it appears from the two win conditions to which I had access that there are no shared wins (note that indie shared wins are common on xkcd).

Re: my role pm

Overswarm wrote:JoelJoel is a big ol’ lie detector. People like to switch their votes around and make muddy trails, but Joel makes everyone stick to their guns and keeps them honest. It’ll be REALLY easy for town to track. This is one of the stronger town abilities, as a common mafia tactic is to vote for player A and ask a pressing question, then switch to player B after being away for a while and listening to someone else's reasoned argument.... then later saying "I voted for A and pushed him here. Where did you do this?" when player A flips scum Days later. Joel also forces people to come to a verbal consensus and puts a spotlight on people who will just go against the flow and do their own thing.

Overswarm wrote:BessieYou should have used your ability. It's very very pro-town -- not anti-town. It also would have been a thorn in Sabrar's side because he wouldn't have been able to do his "I'll lean back in my chair and pontificate, but not lead a charge or shoot a gun" habit.

I think that the reason I (and others) viewed this as a weak role was due to meta differences between our sites. On xkcd we don’t usually require a majority to lynch (this is my first game with this requirement in almost four years of playing here). We also don’t usually hammer (not until at least D3 or D4), as a hammer ends the day (this is also my first game with a twilight phase), and we prefer to use every possible minute available for discussion, especially on D1. And we don’t use voting/unvoting as a means to pressure players as much as DGamers do. In fact, the majority lynch mechanic was driving me crazy most of the game, because I didn’t necessarily get to vote for who I thought was scum, I had to vote to ensure a lynch. But reflecting on it now I would want to try it again before I make a judgment on which method I prefer. But back to my role, I think that if I had used my power, everyone would have just gotten around it by underline voting until the final day anyway, xkcd is full of players that like to game the game.

BoomFrog wrote:Overswarm and YOLO: Thanks for running things especially when it got rough going it alone, it was a fun, well balanced yet very different game. All the powers were basically decoys and it was almost vanilla with lots of things to talk about. Which is actually the best kind of mafia. I think the Mafia B team was a bit too weak though, no kill is very disempowering. They either needed another member or a way to take control of the late game if they survived that long. Maybe give them an arsonist kill or something? I'm very curious how the two unused vote restricting powers would have worked out in practice. Maybe make their use mandatory next time

I disagree though that Mafia B was a bit too weak. There was a bad start with BoomFrog role copping moody, and moody being lynched D1, but if either one of those those things didn’t happen they would have been off to a good start. I think what really blew it for Mafia B was heuristically_alone and then Yolinda lurking out, and the timing of the mod kill. I feel I may have had a shot at winning this if heury had been modkilled on N2, because I would have played D3 very differently, and made sure that I wasn’t “confirmed” town (as a townie with a dead mason partner and what I considered a worthless power I didn’t care about drawing the NK on D3; as a survivor I would).

@ YOLOSWAG

#HBC | YOLOSWAG wrote:Bessie, you really got the short end of the stick with that recruitment, lol. I loved seeing everyone react to that flip.

Knowing that you guys hadn't really dealt with majority lynch before I tried to help with actually making up the 'top 4' and having everyone do reads lists, I think that helped us reach consensus and not scramble. Of course I forced people to scramble anyway, but at least we knew what options were available to us. Fun fact, I took the concept of 'top 4' from Ryker. If your action was used Bessie, I would have instructed everyone to use FOS's instead.

I'll respond more in depth later, especially to Bessie. I'm going to sleep for now.

bessie wrote:After thinking about this all day, I’m wondering if you just wouldn’t let this drop because you were trying too hard to make this stubbornness part of your townie meta.

plytho wrote:The bit about me being happy that this would no longer be my scum meta is quite accurate though

Anyway, I’m not trying to be confrontational, so I’ll leave it up to you, if you want to discuss this further I’m available here or by pm. And I look forward to playing with you again soon, in spite of our misunderstandings you are moving up on my favorites list.

I think do want to discuss this further as it was unintentional and I want to avoid us going through this again in the future. I won't have time for this the coming weeks though as I'm on holiday, enjoying Patagonia.

You've improved a lot, but you gotta learn how to finish a thread. You would travel down a path and either be unable or unwilling to pull the trigger. If you ask everyone questions and don't have a plan, you don't get anything out of it. You need a plan, an end goal, the moment you ask a question.

Overswarm, I'm not sure what plan I should have that isn't getting reads and then following up on those reads. Can you give an example? There were times that I was unwilling to pull the trigger (like on Boom) because I didn't just want to keep going in a linear direction, if I was wrong. I was worried about being wrong. I guess I was wrong either way.

OS Here:

You had a habit of posting:

"Question?

Question? If that, then question? Question?"

then getting a response of:

"Half-hearted answer to some, but not all questions. Rebuttal question?"

then posting:

"Half-hearted answer to their question"

end of thread

If I'm sitting down with someone and ask them "Did you visit X last Night?", I'm not asking because I hope they'll tell the truth. I'm asking because

A) I already know the answer and this will out them as liarsB) I know someone else visited them, want this original person to say "no", and then ask the person I know who visited so that way they'll know this question is important -- thus giving them incentive to lieC) I assume they know that I know (even if I don't) and will tell the truth, thus outing their actions during the Night phase and allowing me to direct their Night abilities

Under no circumstances will I ask a question like "did you visit X last Night?" and just act based on their answers without a plan. I know what my choices are before I ask!

This goes for most questions. Sometimes the questions themselves are useless (e.g., "What do you think of player Y?") but are attempting to limit player options during the Day/Night phase. Whenever anyone says "I know I said X, but...." that's an easy lynch to pull off if I think they are scum.

Take an outsider view on these questions:

#HBC | Zyth wrote: He's scum leaning mpolo because of his claim.Sabrar wrote: And it was important to you to defend mpolo even though Maven's the only one to find him scummy? Why the rush?

Evil George Washington wrote:I would love seeing the funny example. Also I think you have a point. Question though, why do you personally never wait?

What does that question gain you?

And this one indicates that you believe questioning has merit on its own (it does not):

EGW wrote:Should I be concerned that Sir Gabriel has viewed multiple times without any post yet? I still have a question to him.

What does this gain you?

EGW wrote:Sabrar, how's your reads list coming? I'm working on one. I hope you are too.

Would this not be better to just say "Sabrar, give us three you think are scum."?

And this:

EGW wrote:Problem with that mindset is that it causes town to eat itself if most of the scumteam is lurking. It also makes it more likely for scum to use lurking as an option unless they are competent. That is why I'm open to active and inactive scum. Have you guys lost games due to most of the scumteam lurking or not?

Are you going to lynch someone / not lynch someone based on the answer to that question? In any scenario, will an answer cause a scum member to die more often than town?

Good post:

EGW wrote:BoomFrog - Scum. He has Jimbob as a top scum read but after hopping off Dark Horse, he doesn’t vote Jimbob, ask him a question or make a conclusion on him. Gives me the feeling he doesn’t truly care about sorting, and is fine with offing which ever lurker he can get. His Not Mafia reasoning on MPOLO seems forced. I don't see how it seems like something an Indy would do, seems null.

Unvote; Vote: Boomfrog

You caught Boomfrog on D1 acting without purpose! That's good. It's important to note that there are no questions in the above post. Only observations and reactions.

Bad post I will break down:

EGW wrote:If a person opens saying that my play is different then usual, I then ask them how it is different. Reason I ask him is because in my last game I have done the same exact thing, and I'm not giving in game examples of my play here. I just ask him what is different about it to see why he would say that. Then if he responds I'd explain my thought process when posting so he can see what I was thinking in the current time. I know it'd be morning for you but when I say 'good night' I am saying good night to the thread since it's night for me. I remembered someone mentioning the ability to ISO but I wasn't going to dig for that, it would be faster for me to ask that while I'm re-reading. I engage you because I want to see what's in your head. I like to bounce ideas with town reads, and I like to work together with them. You feel weird, weird how? Do you think how I engage Zyth is weird? Because I think it's the same type of interaction.

The above post doesn't help -- only hurts!

If a person opens saying that my play is different then usual, I then ask them how it is different. Reason I ask him is because in my last game I have done the same exact thing, and I'm not giving in game examples of my play here. I just ask him what is different about it to see why he would say that. Then if he responds I'd explain my thought process when posting so he can see what I was thinking in the current time.

If you made a matrix of all the possible answers to "how is my play different?", 0 of the options in the matrix result in scum outing themselves in any particular way.

I engage you because I want to see what's in your head. I like to bounce ideas with town reads, and I like to work together with them. You feel weird, weird how? Do you think how I engage Zyth is weird? Because I think it's the same type of interaction.

This is like a "get out of jail free" card for scum. You describe your thought process and do so in such a way that scum -- of which there are at least two -- can just take different approaches to you and at least one of them can buddy you.

You then follow it up with another "null" question. "Weird how?" doesn't have a real tangible answer. "Is how I engage Zyth weird?" is binary and neither choice results in you gaining any reliable information.

I could go on with the posts, but if I was scum I would have let you live to end game simply because:

1) You asked a lot of questions, but very few had barbs2) You didn't command town in any way, so you couldn't push reads on your own3) Given that you asked a lot of questions I could fill up threads with irrelevant information, making it difficult for less invested players to catch up

Asking for reads lists so you can get a baseline of someone's thought process can be good, but nine times out of ten it's better to ask them what they think of a specific person.

Example:

"What's your reads list, Sabrar?"

Sabrar posts reads list

three pages later...

"Sabrar, you voted for X, but in reads list said you had them lean townie. Explain!"

Sabrar says: "Changed my mind."

alternatively

"Sabrar, you voted for X, but you have them listed as "maybe scum" and had player Y as "likely scum". Explain!"

Sabrar says: "Changed my mind."

and Sabrar has committed no crime.

however, if you find someone you think is town or scum and you ask directly:

"Sabrar, what do you think of player X?"

Sabrar: "I think they're town."

"What do you think of me?"

Sabrar: "I think you're town too."

"Good, I think you're town too! I say we vote together. Hard body crew! We act like a triple voter. Since you think we're both town, this should be a pretty easy decision. I know I'm town, and assuming there's a 3-man scum team out of the 20 players remaining that means we have about a 15% chance that you're scum. The odds of both of you being scum are much lower, which means even IF one of us is scum, the other two are town. The math is the same for all of us.

So now if we want to #HBC, just post #HBC with your vote and that'll be your HBC choice. If two of us agree, the third one has to join."

Suddenly, Sabrar just lost his vote or has to make himself really, really visible and against this -- while simultaneously proclaiming both you and player X as town.

alternatively:

"Sabrar, what do you think of player X?"

Sabrar "Scum."

"Agreed. Vote: Player X

Let's go Sabrar."

Question -> Immediate action -> Townie in a good position or Scum in a bad one

If you don't have an immediate action based off of their response, then you're just hoping to get lucky... and even if you get lucky, you don't have the votes to kill them (like boomfrog D1). That means you'd need to convince the rest of town, which means it's better to make a spectacle anyway!

Just make sure your questions have barbs to them and that "I changed my mind" isn't a valid response if they go back on what they posted.

bessie wrote:Hey, Overmarshy, if you have time, can you post the role pms and win conditions? Or are they super secret information?

I think Marshy has the most recent ones with pictures and the like. :3

I think that the reason I (and others) viewed this as a weak role was due to meta differences between our sites. On xkcd we don’t usually require a majority to lynch (this is my first game with this requirement in almost four years of playing here). We also don’t usually hammer (not until at least D3 or D4), as a hammer ends the day (this is also my first game with a twilight phase), and we prefer to use every possible minute available for discussion, especially on D1. And we don’t use voting/unvoting as a means to pressure players as much as DGamers do. In fact, the majority lynch mechanic was driving me crazy most of the game, because I didn’t necessarily get to vote for who I thought was scum, I had to vote to ensure a lynch. But reflecting on it now I would want to try it again before I make a judgment on which method I prefer. But back to my role, I think that if I had used my power, everyone would have just gotten around it by underline voting until the final day anyway, xkcd is full of players that like to game the game.

Your site is behind the times in Mafia strategy then!

Ending the day isn't bad as long as you have a reason to lynch someone.

Think of it this way:

Who is more likely to be able to wiggle out of a wagon and get one started on another player? Town, or a scum member with 2 or 3 teammates?

The strategy of "don't end the day early" results in scum being able to wiggle out more often than town, meaning you're more likely to mislynch.

Coming with the imperative of "I will lynch when I say I will lynch!" attached to every vote, now scum can't dilly dally or stall with "now let's not end the Day early, right?" and most importantly each vote is important.

LaserGuy wrote:I'm amused that we have 200 more posts than you in our chat and only started in D3

I intentionally minimized our chat to specifically needed advice and information. One, to avoid the risk of referring in thread accidentally to info discussed in Mafia chat, and two, to make sure Sabrar and I didn't talk so much that Red didn't have time to keep up.

"Everything I need to know about parenting I learned from cooking. Don't be afraid to experiment, and eat your mistakes." - Cronos

Welcome back! From an objective pov a Lyncher who is actively trying to lynch townie players cannot be considered pro-town, regardless of the player's intention. But then I'm not the best guy to ask about this.Also this post of yours didn't get you many friends here, we're not used to that sort of name-calling.

Gamma Emerald wrote:I have one thing to say, and that is I was trying to be pro-town this game. Whether you can accept that will determine my final opinion of this community.

Personally, I have no particular anti-indie sentiments, but I've been stung by this on one or two occasions (trying to help an indie get a win, resulting in my own loss once due to unexpected interactions in abilities, being the obvious example - see Trial of the Pariahs). FWIW, I'm naturally pro-town as an indie as well (see Diablo Mafia). Throwing yourself on the Glados bomb was very kind of you and I hope we'll see you around again.

Gamma Emerald wrote:I have one thing to say, and that is I was trying to be pro-town this game. Whether you can accept that will determine my final opinion of this community.

I think you were trying to be protown, and your frustration was obviously genuine. Even as scum I tried to defend you, though I wasn't trying to actually effectively defend you...

Anyway, it seems you were more townie then scum but not as townie as actual town, so basically yeah, protown Indy. But an Indy is still a risk, and lynching even a protown Indy is a less bad worst case scenario compared to other lynch candidates, so once you are out as an Indy it is always an uphill battle.

Try not to take a game about manipulation too personally. The undertone of distrust makes even town-town interactions more cutting then real life interactions.

"Everything I need to know about parenting I learned from cooking. Don't be afraid to experiment, and eat your mistakes." - Cronos